Gamesmanship

On the NZ left wing site, The Standard, an article written by a woman about the fairness and safety issues implicit in the presence in women’s boxing of two athletes who may / probably have a 46XY disorder of sexual development or differentiation (DSD) of the sort that grants them some degree of androgen-related performance advantage over their 46XX opponents, prompted a response from a man.

The heading and the tenor of the second piece was guaranteed to trigger the, now usual, heated debate about the implications for women’s sex-based rights of gender-identity related shifts in legislation, policy, and procedure.

 

Even though the debate was largely measured in tone, it resulted in a threat to the very existence of the site, and then to the original article being removed. 

 

It’s not appropriate to speculate about the reasons for the threat to close the site being issued, but the invariably intemperate responses swirling around the questions of sex versus gender identity, and specifically, gender self-identification by statutory declaration, may have played a role.

 

Transgender and intersex issues do not overlap usually but the inclusion of the latter in the ever-increasing number of groups jostling for position under the transgender umbrella, means that some people don’t acknowledge any difference. 

 

The problems inherent in this lazy conflation are exemplified by the likes of JK Rowling, Donald Trump and Elon Musk weighing in on the women's boxing.  It was a rerun of the furore when Caster Semenya of South Africa, Margaret Wambui of Kenya, and Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi took the medals in the women’s 800m at the Rio Olympics. All three athletes were found to have had an XY karyotype and to produce levels of testosterone in the male range, with no definitive evidence of how much their bodies benefitted from it. 

 

The resulting controversy saw the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) now World Athletics, impose a differential standard for athletes with male levels of testosterone, which affected African athletes disproportionately. That in turn provoked a storm of protest which led to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) developing a broad framework for fairness, safety, and inclusion within which the various international sporting bodies would develop their own rules for eligibility. 

 

It is worth stating that only the female category in sports is at issue; men's sports are not in any way affected by these fairness, safety, and inclusion issues.

 

There can be no doubt there is a wider geo-political back cloth to all this in the claims of corruption and ties to the Kremlin swirling around the International Boxing Association (IBA) ie the US-led boycott of the 2023 IBA world champs; the formation of World Boxing as an alternative body, in competition with the IBA; the IBA’s disqualification, mid-competition, of the two boxers on the grounds of having an XY karyotype; the removal of the IBAs Olympic accreditation, and the IOC decision to set up an ad hoc committee to run boxing which allowed the two IBA disqualified boxers to compete.

Both swept through their weight grades with unprecedented 5-0 wins in all rounds.

 

Many of the women in the sport of boxing are likely to be on the high side of the standard reference range for female levels of testosterone. On average they are tall for women and are physically tough, and the women at the Olympics will be the best in their respective countries. 

Either Lin and Khelif are both atypical in respect of their physical abilities in the sport, or they possess an androgen-related performance advantage in the male range. 

 

The rise of Islamophobia and the far right across Europe, the specifics of the experience of Algerians when it was a French colony and as migrants to France, all form a backcloth of which the likes of JK Rowling should have been aware.

 

I never expected any better from her because before the issue of sex self ID hit the political fan, she threw her considerable  weight and influence behind the anti-Corbyn faction in the UK Labour Party, and she is a firm ally of Israel. It would have been more surprising if she had refrained from inflaming the situation.  

 

Some people who comment are simply not au fait enough with the issues; some are angry for a wide range of reasons which I have written about extensively – albeit polemically – on this blog, and some of them are engaged in various sorts of divisive and diversionary behaviour. 

 

Without re-entering the ring to engage in further ideological fisticuffs, I will just say that the bottom line for me is as it has always been, we must be able to address these and related issues in a way that doesn’t demonise people who are caught in a geo-political shit storm not of their making. We must avoid division, and diversion of time and energy away from more important issues. 

 

We must also remember the reasons why those who rule us encourage people to obsess about obscenely expensive circuses like the Olympic Games. 

 

I thought the Paris games would be a focus for attention grabbing protests about such issues as Gaza and climate change but if any happened, they didn’t make global headlines. 

 

The brave individual gestures made by athletes to try to get the world's focus onto what is happening across Africa, in Afghanistan, Palestine etc were obscured by an obsessive media and public focus on one person competing in a fringe sport. 


 

And that was not the fault of one side only; it takes two to politically tango.

 

I will not readdress the issues of transwomen’s participation in women’s sport as this is a different, albeit linked issue. 

 

As I try to see all these issues through a wide political lens, for me, this firestorm Illustrates why it’s so important always to pull aside the ideological veils to see if there is anything sinister lurking behind them. 

 

With regard to DSDs and how a decent society responds to people affected by them, the individual’s rights to privacy, to personal dignity, to wider formal tights, and to timely treatment when needed, are a given. There should be no debate. 

 

There are formal, codified rights and informal social rights which are embedded in the social compact. The two don’t always neatly align and sometimes they clash.

 

Neither sort of rights is absolute, as sometimes one set of rights affects others. Also, all rights carry with them a range of duties and obligations to the wider collective. 

 

Social life is a series of compromises, and as we live in world riven with structural inequalities, some people are forced to make endless compromises whilst others, the rich and powerful usually, get to float through life making hardly any. 

 

People with DSDs are not a “community”; there is huge range of types of DSD, some of which vary widely in how they present. They were lumped together under the non-scientific descriptor of “Intersex” for political lobbying purposes because historically many people with DSDs had been treated shamefully by the medical establishment. 

 

Within medicine the attitude was, and remains in some countries and cultures, that if a neonate does not have a normal looking penis and scrotum, s/he should be made a girl, legally and if available, via forms of surgery and drug treatments. 

 

Being crisscrossed by wider social factors like religion, by parental rights and expectations and the rights of the infant/child etc, it is not an easy terrain to navigate.

 

Sometimes these days in the developed world we settle on doing only that which is needed to ensure health and well-being, waiting until the person is old enough to make their own informed decisions. 

 

In some societies, parents don’t have that luxury.  Living inside the imperial bubble we forget the grimmer realities of life for impoverished people, especially women.

 

Our self-congratulations on how progressive we are in the way we now see the wide range of DSDs, rings hollow if we fail to ask whether those conditions are increasing in incidence, range and/or severity, or is it merely the fact that they are now being diagnosed more easily and more often?

 

There is a range of political movements that are aimed at normalising pathologies. All too often, the so-called progressive left fails to ask the obvious question when that normalisation is enthusiastically embraced and even enabled by corporations and powerful corporate-compliant institutions. 

 

The first question to be asked is whether these processes of normalisation help to obscure causal factors which are attributable to those corporations and institutions.

 

There is a global increase in childhood cancers, and in developmental and reproductive disorders. 

Microplastics have been found in all organs in humans, including the brain.

 

Clinical obesity was once uncommon in young people and morbid obesity was once rare in adults; it is now commonplace, especially among the poor.

 

Type 2 diabetes was rare in adults and unknown in children; it is now commonplace and appearing frequently in kids.

 

The range of triggers and incidence of life-threatening allergies has increased, as have rates of autism.

 

There is a global drop in sperm quality and an increase in reproductive cancers and conditions like endometriosis.

 

Kids are entering puberty younger, and the incidence of central precocious puberty is increasing with links to the presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment.


 

If we fail to draw aside the ideological veils that we surely all know are used to obscure causal factors directly attributable to profit-hungry corporations and their compliant, enabling governments, we are aiding and abetting the culprits. 

 

Normalisation of the pathological is a widely used ideological veil that is made opaquer when the component of human rights is added to it.

 

Autism becomes something to celebrate as neurodiversity, aka being on the spectrum. 

 

Clinical and even morbid obesity become just normal variations in the amount and distribution of adipose tissue, and any attempts to examine it as a pathological response to metabolic triggers are deemed to be fat-shaming orfatphobic. 

 

DSDs become evidence of human reproductive diversity, or proof that sex is not binary leading to such risible claims as there being 5 or 6 sexes. 

 

Call me a cynic but every time I see attempts to normalise the pathological, I want to investigate further. 

 

Several decades ago, I was drawn into researching endocrine disruption in horses. I was seeing mares with the equine equivalent of polycystic ovarian syndrome; obesity and patterns of grossly abnormal adipose tissue; hind gut disorders leading to catastrophic tissue failure in the hooves; unusual neurological conditions. 

 

There were lots of explanations about why, all pretty much missing the herd of tap-dancing elephants in the corner of the room which included the ubiquity of endocrine disrupting and DNA damaging chemicals in the environment. 


 

Studies which draw a link between EDCs in agricultural chemicals, like a study linking CPP to agricultural EDCs in rural France, once languished in the dark or were dumbed down by that part of the coordinator class which is employed to put an ideological spin on scientific studies for public dissemination via a compliant media.

 

These days there is a critical mass of data about these chemicals – some of which fall into the category of “forever chemicals” because of the time they persist in the environment – so the issue is becoming better known.


 

However, the vast petro-chemical industry responsible for their manufacture, and the various industries which use them, won't suddenly grow a conscience and say "mea culpa" and clean up its mess, so it's up to us to keep shining a light on these issues, and keep demanding answers. 

 

Science strives to be neutral in its methodology, but it has always struggled to be genuinely neutral because research needs funding, and with funds, be they from corporations, governments, foundations etc, come with strings. Those strings define not just what will be studied but also what conclusions are drawn, how the data is presented publicly and to what use the findings will be put. 

 

This is never truer than in the Neo-liberal era in which corporate funders often dictate the subject and scope of scientific enquiry.

 

So, whenever I see processes that seek to normalise pathologies  which appear to  have the laudable aim of benefiting people, but which actually benefit hyper-capitalism, I get edgy.

 

We should always bear on mind that anything which divides people, which distracts and diverts political energy and focus away from the causes of these existential threats is very likely serving the interests of the people who created them...for profit, solely for profit.

 

Punch Bags

Without entering the realms of speculation about the medical history of the two individuals at the heart of the Paris olympics' women’s boxing debacle, there are some pertinent facts about the sport of boxing in general that people should bear in mind before deciding on which ideological hill to make a stand.

Women’s boxing was first introduced into the summer olympics in 2012. From 2016, professionals were allowed to enter and the same year the requirement for male boxers to wear padded head gear was removed on the grounds that padded headgear does not decrease concussion risk. However, women still have to wear it. 

The weight and style of gloves are controlled. Female boxers must not be pregnant, and they are required to wear breast protection because getting punched in the breast is not only potentially very painful, especially during menstruation, it is potentially damaging to long term health.  

Male boxers wear groin protection, and punches below the belt, or to the kidney region or back of the head are proscribed for both sexes.

The reason that women are still required to wear head gear may be more for face and ear protection than concerns about risk of concussion.   

The human face is highly vulnerable to cuts and fractures even from a padded glove, and the female face typically lacks the stronger bone of such post-pubertal male features as the brow ridge and stronger jaw. 

The sometimes permanently disfiguring effects of broken face bones, and damage to nasal and ear cartilage have greater social significance to women and very likely, the sort of facial harm that is routine in male boxing being done to women is not deemed a good look for the olympics. 

Most importantly, the brain of both sexes is highly vulnerable to the effects of a blow to the head because the easily damaged brain bounces around inside the skull. If a fighter falls heavily onto their head, the effects may be worse still. The main reason the floor of the boxing ring is sprung and the posts are heavily padded is to reduce the risk of brain or spinal trauma from impacting them heavily.

If a boxer is dehydrated – a common factor in pre-fight measures to make the very strictly controlled weight grades – the damaging effects on the brain may be amplified. 

Sometimes blows to the head result in obvious symptoms of mild concussion which, in boxing, could be a technical knock out; sometimes they result in a more severe concussion involving loss of consciousness – a literal knock out. 

What is now known about concussion is that if you have even a mild one, you should avoid any further blows to the head as they are likely to exacerbate the damage to the delicate structures of the brain.

More serious brain damage can be catastrophic and from a single blow, or accumulative from repeated blows. 

All contact sports involve the risk of forms and degrees of harm, but boxing is the only sport in which causing harm to your opponent's brain is not just permitted, if the damage is severe enough to result in a technical or a literal knock out, it's an automatic win. 

The aim of delivering blows to the torso and arms in boxing are not just for the points that can be scored by hitting the target areas of head and torso, they are also to hurt and tire the opponent to make them drop their guard so that bout-winning blows to the head can be delivered.

The importance of all this to the current situation in women's olympic boxing is, if boxers competing in the female category happen to have a genetic condition which has resulted in full or partial virilisation at puberty, they will have all or part of the very significant average performance advantage (APA) that male boxers have over female boxers. 

Part of that APA resides in a far greater punching power due, in large part, to the proportion of male body weight which is skeletal muscle and bone. 

People who have gone through a male puberty will typically have a significantly greater proportion of their body weight in bone and skeletal muscle than people who have gone through female puberty. This means their body type is more effective both in delivering punches, and in absorbing them. 

If that happened, it would not be fair, nor would it be safe.

There is no doubt in my mind that all these athletes are being used as pawns by forces engaged in a wider geo-political battle. 

The hapless boxers who have been drawn into this debacle now include a young Russian whose name has been dredged up from the round of 16 in the 2023 world champs as “proof” that the “Russian-led IBA” banned Khelif in order to restore the Russian woman's unbeaten record.   

This piece of mind-boggling post-hoc mendacity, which has appeared on Khelif’s Wikipedia page and widely via the western media, requires us to ignore all the preceding political shenanigans such as the US-led boycott of the IBA, the formation of World Boxing in opposition to the IBA, and the removal of IBA’s olympic accreditation etc. 

It also requires us to completely ignore the other women of colour who Khelif beat to get to gold medal contention, and focus instead on a very young, very blonde Russian thus helping to stoke both Russophobia, and the ethnically-charged elements of the drama which are exemplified by an emotive post on X which claimed in relation to Carini, that “white women’s tears have ruined another brown woman’s life”. 

I deplore the right's hysterical reaction which, by such despicable tactics as declaring Khelif to be a sexual predator, has descended en masse into the gutter where it is indulging in shameless Islamophobia.

On the other side, the west’s various useful idiots are focussing inordinate amounts of time and energy on supporting Khelif (Lin seems to be reduced to a supporting role), and on attacking “terfs”. 

As a result, most are paying little or no attention to the Israeli team whose presence at the olympics was expected to be the focus of much comment and protests, given the Israeli government’s shameful and on-going actions in Gaza and more widely in the Middle East. 

Go figure. 

How are the mighty fallen ..

A sports writer for Yahoo!NZ, writing under the pseudonym of The Man in the Stands, joined the feeding frenzy around Lance Armstrong’s professional corpse. 

In a piece that, even by Yahoo!NZ standards, was remarkable for its emotive hyperbole, the writer expressed his disgust, shock, horror and revulsion at the – cowardly, cold-blooded, lying, deceiving, stealing, swindling, pilfering, cheating, con artist, ragbag, scumbag, monster. 

All that in a 440-word blog,

Unlike a lot of people who are queuing up to kick his corpse, I’ve never had a lot of time for Armstrong, but I refuse to join the likes of TMITS in baying for what they call "'justice"– but which, in truth, is vengeance. They want to see Armstrong suffer, and they justify that by claiming that they feel sympathy for his "victims" and outrage at his dishonesty. The truth is they’re full of anger, which prevents them from thinking and creates the potential for them to behave as badly as the object of their ire has done.

Armstrong’s offending is not unique; it’s not even unusual. He's the product of the confluence of massive corporate sponsorship of cycling (which started with American cyclist, Greg LeMond) and European cycling organisations that wanted to break into the rich US market. 

Armstrong was in the first-class carriage of a fast moving gravy train but he wasn’t the driver and he didn’t own the locomotive. He was able to do what he did because his corporate sponsors and sports officials turned a blind eye to what was going on, and they did so because his high-profile success was making them a load of money.

Nor is road cycling the only corporate-funded gravy train in professional sport, and it’s far from being the richest. You have only to look at golf, tennis, football and basketball to see that Armstrong’s wealth and his attitudes are anything but unusual.

Armstrong’s an elite and extremely skilled athlete in a demanding and very dangerous team sport; the use of drugs, plus his organisational ability and obsessive competitive drive, made him a phenomenal athlete. 

Had he been content with equaling the tour wins record he may have got away with it, but celebrity and power are notorious corrupters, and he came to believe his own narrative. He also hurt and angered enough people on the way up for his fall from grace to be emotional and very public. But, what made him behave badly is a quality common to all elite athletes – a single-minded determination to win. It is a small step from single-minded to ruthless.  

When Floyd Landis won Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour de France, anyone who knew cycling could tell he’d taken something, and given the way he was riding, that it was most likely to be testosterone. He went from riding like a stunned mullet the day before, to riding like a man possessed. That was incredibly dumb. 

Armstrong was clever and systematic in his use of banned substances and procedures, just like he was in his training and his team organisation. The training systems and procedures Michele Ferrari developed (EPO use aside) and which Armstrong utilised, and Armstrong’s race tactics, are now part and parcel of how professional cycling works. And Armstrong built on the American revolution in team organisation and application of technology that was started by Greg LeMond.

Did Armstrong force his team to use banned substances? In the sense that, to be of use to him they had to perform to his drug-enhanced level, that’s probably true. But, they did not have to stay with him and if they did so, it was because the rewards, in terms of money and professional profile, were great enough to stifle medical or ethical concerns. 

What of the claims that Armstrong "destroyed" people? 

Tyler Hamilton is doing the reformed character bit with his best-selling confessional book and appearances on the after-dinner speaker circuit. 

The most high-profile accuser is Betsy Andreu who speaks often and emotively about Armstrong having tried to destroy her family. However, Frankie Andreu worked with Armstrong for years after he and Betsy say they heard him admit to using banned substances in 1996, and they all remained close friends. The split came after the Andreus didn’t get the rewards they expected, first a contract renewal, and then a Directeur Sportif job.  

In an interview with Sports Illustrated recently, when Andreu was asked if she felt proud about her moral stance, she said “Yeah, I get that. But sometimes it feels like there's no profit in the truth, right? Would you rather have Lance's money right now, or my reputation?” 

Betsy Andreu may be as hooked on celebrity as Armstrong. She is also an absolutist and is as driven and obsessive as he is but is emotional and an ardent Catholic, while Armstrong hides his emotions and is an atheist. If he suddenly found God, perhaps America and Betsy Andreu would find it easier to forgive him.

Andreu said that she knew Floyd Landis’ Christian upbringing would lead him to confessing his sins but the path to that confession took a remarkably circuitous route via a book called "Positively False," solicitation of legal funds from his fans, and attacking Greg LeMond. 

In 2010, Landis filed a lawsuit against Armstrong and others to force repayment of the $30m+ in government sponsorship of the US Postal team. Landis (eventually) admitted to doping while riding for the team which he now claims "defrauded" the US government, a fraud that he benefitted from, and he now stands to make $millions by suing Armstrong and his financial backers, for that fraud. If successful, the action will give Landis 15-25% of the $300m if the U.S. Department of Justice joins the suit and takes the lead role, or 25-30% if he pursues the case alone. This is a travesty of whistle blowing legislation, but perhaps he’ll donate the proceeds to charity. 

If Landis, or any of the other post-hoc bean-spillers had serious moral scruples about doping they would have distanced themselves from Armstrong.  If Armstrong is personally to blame for what he did, so are they.  The only people who have a right to be aggrieved are the completely clean riders who might otherwise have won stages or tours, and the lower order of domestiques who could reasonably claim to have been pressured into doping.

Armstrong’s greatest mistake was to deny his offending past the point where the denials had any credibility. His nemesis, David Walsh, has been on anti-doping crusade for thirteen years and his pursuit of Armstrong became as obsessive as Armstrong’s pursuit of power and success. Walsh was right but there is a strong vein of moralism running through all this, and it suits that narrative to cast Armstrong in the role of a ruthless Machiavellian mastermind. It also makes for great press and television and now the only way he can slide out from under it is to turn supergrass like Landis – or find God.

Professional sports people and those who back them always skirt the rule boundaries and the rewards, in terms of money and celebrity, are now so enormous that many take the risk of doping. 

The US Olympic cycling team used blood doping in 1984 and it may be endemic in many sports that have not yet had the scrutiny to which road cycling has been subjected. The reason doping became endemic in road cycling is partly due to the physical demands of the sport itself and partly the pressures imposed by corporate sponsorship.

Before we all drown in the sea of smug, sanctimonious twaddle that is pouring out of the media, let’s consider where the pressure to use performance-enhancing drugs comes from and where performance enhancement starts. It’s okay to use a hyperbaric chamber and to train at altitude but not to use EPO, which has the same effects. 

It can be argued that the prophylactic use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories enhances performance in that it allows athletes to push their body beyond its normal limits in competition. NSAIDs can be bought over the counter, and team doctors hand them out during events and matches, despite the fact that the drugs are a metabolic and circulatory time bomb and especially dangerous if the person taking them is dehydrated. Logically, NSAIDs should be banned in sporting competition just as they are banned in horse racing. 

I’m not excusing Armstrong but I think the greater fault lies with corporate sponsorship of sport and its branding mania. Commentators should reserve some of their hyperbole for Nike, Trek, Oakley, Shimano, the TV networks and all the other corporations that made $billions out of Armstrong and those that are making $billions out of other elite sportspeople.

I reserve my pity and concern for the workers in poorly regulated countries, who are paid a pittance to produce shoddy commodities that mythologised athletes are grossly overpaid to sell to a dumb or uncaring public. 

In that sense, we, the consumers of those products, are as much to blame as athletes who take shortcuts. If we really cared about "cheating", we’d stop buying the products that encourage it. 

Racism

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable… like all Pakehas would be happy with their daughter coming home with a Maori boy? The answer is they wouldn’t.”

What struck me about this statement when it was first made was the patriarchal prejudice that who might impregnate your daughter is more important than who your son might impregnate. Who your son marries may be a different matter of course.

But I was more interested in the fact that Hone Harawira’s statement and the "white M-F’ers" quote, (written in a private email and published without his knowledge or consent) were widely cited on public fora as a counterbalance to racial remarks made by several white commentators.

Harawira may have meant what he said or he may have been winding people up by recycling a common Pakeha prejudice. Whatever his intention, it resulted in him being accused of being racist and to the simplistically, and to the ideologically minded, "Māori racism" cancels out "white racism".

We humans are intensely social animals with very distinctive faces and an extraordinary ability to recognise subtle difference in facial and body gestures. We devote a large amount of our brain to deciphering and storing visual information about other humans.

In the course of our social evolution we have developed such widely differing cultures that the members of those cultures can find it hard to understand each other and not just in terms of speech.

But, you only have to look at the babies and very small children of all cultures and classes – to see the indicators of a common heritage. Tiny tots are never racist or snobs. That’s acquired; learned for the most part from their parents.

Recognition and wariness of difference or a preference for those who are the same as you, does not necessarily mean you are racist.

Racism is commonly defined as prejudice or unfair discrimination based on race. For that definition to mean anything there has to be an underlying acceptance of the idea that there are distinct "human races", the members of which possess definable attributes and characteristics.

This is the basis of the broad, quasi-scientific categories of Australoid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. There is a complex debate about the extent to which there may be definable "racial" differences but racism is not about any actual differences, it is about relative superiority and inferiority.

The origins of racism lie in the misappropriation of Darwin’s ideas about evolution to create a "scientific" basis for the superiority of the white skinned peoples of the world – and the English speaking white peoples in particular.

If humans evolved from ape-like ancestors any humans who, because of the shape of their skull or colour of their skin were closer to that ancestor, were deemed to be not as highly evolved.

These ideas, which reached their peak at the height of Britain’s imperial expansion, proved to be useful in legitimating colonialism and assuaging guilt over slavery.

The horrors of the early African slave trade had not required an ideological mask largely because the lives of the ordinary European sailors, labourers and paupers were not so far removed from those of the slaves, ie they experienced a lesser degree of exploitation and brutality and had only nominal freedom.

But science and the rise of an educated middle class demanded a more sophisticated justification for such a brutal and cruel economic exploitation, and for the processes involved in annexing other people’s countries.

The answer lay in the twin hierarchies of race and social class, helped along by notions of male supremacy.

Colonisation was said to have brought the benefits of white (superior) civilisation to the dark (inferior) races; just as industrial capitalism brought benefits to the (inferior)  labouring classes.

Thus a natural curiosity about or even wariness towards those who don’t look or act the same as us, morphed into beliefs about "racial" superiority and inferiority that were used to justify brutal economic exploitation, enslavement and genocide – and still are.

That brutality in turn was justified as being the result of "human nature".

But this didn’t and doesn’t happen simply because of human nature. It’s as much human nature to be inclusive, cooperative and compassionate, as it is to be exclusive, uncaring and harshly competitive.

Racism as an ideology serves a definite function; it divides – and to divide is necessary in order to conquer and rule.

I get very concerned about the overuse of the term "racism" – because the application of it to any and all prejudiced views or conduct risks emptying it of all political meaning.

The fact is, we all discriminate; every waking moment we make choices about how to act that are based on perceptions of difference. We also all prejudge, i.e., we arrive at conclusions based on incomplete or biased evidence – very often what someone in a position of authority has told us is true.

Sometimes those processes of discrimination and prejudgement result in outcomes that are good ones for us and not harmful to others; but sometimes they result in unjust attitudes and conduct towards others.

There are those for whom it is advantageous that people take decisions based on biased or incomplete information. A most potent element of this ideological strategy is the creation and promulgation of negative stereotypes based on exaggerated difference, and the counterposing of those against equally exaggerated positive stereotypes.

If those stereotypes gain added legitimacy through an appeal to religion or science or by tapping into real concerns and fears, their ability to increase prejudice and to foment division is enhanced.

The fact that many societies place a social premium on lighter toned skin is often cited as evidence that colour prejudice is both universal and natural. But the origin of this isn‘t "racism" but social class.

The labouring classes or castes had weathered skin. Only those who had others to labour for them could keep the soft, paler, clean skins they were born with. Thus a paler, soft skin on the face and hands was and remains the most potent symbol of privilege, marking out the owner of it as a person who does not have to labour.

The Chinese fetish of tiny bound feet had a parallel in the Victorian fetish of tiny corseted waists. Exaggerated fashions such as sleeves that hang down over the hands, extremely high heels, very long fingernails were (and are) social markers sending out the message that this is a person who does not labour – either at all, or at least, not by hand.

The seeds of social Darwinism’s racial hierarchy fell on very fertile soil.

Martin Van Beynen (Press, Oct 16) argued that Paul Henry was not being racist because he did not overtly promote the superiority of one race over another.

But, as a current affairs presenter, Henry’s personal prejudices are combined with a considerable power to influence public opinion. That combination of race-based prejudice and the power to influence others took his statements into the realms of racism.

The same applies to Tony Veitch’s statement about Serena Williams, to Paul Holmes’ labelling of the UN General Secretary as a "cheeky darky", and to Michael Laws’ steady stream of prejudice. We all know that the "feral underclass" is code for brown-skinned people.

Racism needs to be viewed as the combination of negative prejudices based on skin colour or social or cultural attributes, and unfairly discriminatory acts that gain legitimacy through the exercise of social, political, economic or military power.

That was, and largely remains, a European phenomenon but it is not inherent to Europeans. Does the ruling class in China, in its pursuit of the wealth of Africa, have a greater regard for the African people than the Englishmen who grew rich on the slave trade?

This is where Hone Harawira needs to be careful. He may have very good reasons, historical and contemporary, personal and cultural, for feeling antipathy to white New Zealanders. But the moment he generalises the conduct and characteristics of some white New Zealanders to all white New Zealanders and uses his political power to add weight to his words, he enters that arena where personal prejudice becomes racism.

However his power to influence is arguably way less than that of the white majority.

To understand why the words "nigger" or "black Mfer" in the mouth of a white person has more power than the words "honky" or "white MFers" in the mouth of a black or brown person, you only need to look at which continent is still being pillaged, what peoples are still at the bottom the world’s hierarchy of power and privilege.

In the vicious, divisive and cruel hierarchy of colour, white still trumps everything, yellow trumps brown – and yes, sometimes brown trumps black.

Africa – the cradle of human kind, whose peoples’ forced labour laid the foundations of industrial capitalism and the Europeans’ world dominance, is the richest continent with the poorest people.

And that’s the context in which remarks like Henry’s and co have to be put.